How Pastors Are Using AI Right Now
A field map of what is already operating in your ministry
Last Tuesday morning, somewhere in this country, a pastor opened his laptop and started his sermon outline with a prompt. By Wednesday afternoon, he had used the same model to draft a follow-up email to a grieving widow, summarize his counseling notes from a difficult Monday session, suggest titles for a four-week series, and rewrite the church’s social media copy because the youth pastor said the old version was getting no engagement. By Thursday he had asked it for a Hebrew word study. On Friday, he asked for help framing a sensitive conversation with an elder. By Saturday, his wife asked him what he was reading and he said, distractedly, “It’s just my notes,” even though the notes had been processed by something that does not have a body.
None of this is hypothetical.
This is a snapshot of pastoral ministry in 2026. The men I am describing are not careless or unfaithful, but they are coming at this from very different directions.
Some of them are exhausted. Competent, conscientious, carrying a counseling load and a preaching calendar that have not given them an inch in years. AI showed up at the right moment, took some of the weight, and gave them back a few hours they did not have. They feel relieved, not triumphant, and the relief is honest. There is something in that relief worth taking seriously.
Others are the opposite. They feel like they have been handed a superpower. The pastor who used to prep one sermon a week is generating three. The man who used to write five emails a day is moving forty. He is launching a second campus, expanding the discipleship curriculum, drafting a book in his off-hours, and handling more pastoral correspondence than any one man could handle alone, because in fact he is not handling it alone. He feels like Superman. Some of what he is doing is genuinely good. Some of it is genuinely dangerous. The work of telling those two apart is the work this moment requires of him.
Both men are using AI. Both have thought about it. Of course they have. They are pastors. The question this moment puts to every man holding a charge is whether the thinking has been pressed against Scripture, surfaced with elders and peers, and allowed to settle into convictions before the AI use itself hardens into habit. That is a question this post will not answer for you. It will only put it in front of you, perhaps more clearly than it has been put before.
This is a field map, not a verdict. I will not tell you which uses are faithful and which are not. That is what the rest of this publication exists to work out, post by post. What I will do is name, with as much honesty as I can manage, what is happening right now.
Because what is unseen forms us anyway.
Sermon Preparation
This is the headline use case, and the one most Christians would be horrified to learn about if they did not already know. Sixty-four percent of pastors are using AI in some form to prepare what they preach on Sunday, and that number is almost certainly low. Adoption is moving at the pace of the models themselves, which is to say very fast and still accelerating. The range is enormous. On one end, a pastor uses a model to brainstorm illustrations or to check that he has not misread a Greek participle. On the other end, the entire sermon is generated by a system and lightly polished before it is delivered as the Word of God.
These are not the same thing, and any honest treatment of AI in the church has to start by saying so.
The full ethical argument on sermon preparation is the work of “When the Shepherd Didn’t Write the Sermon,” already published in this publication. If you have not read it, that is the place to go. For the purposes of this map, what you need to see is that sermon prep is the most public and most contested AI use in ministry, and the pastor who tells himself he is “just using it for grammar” needs to know that men he stands next to in his presbytery may be using it to do the entire homiletical work.
Here is the question that haunts the sermon-prep conversation, and I will let it do its work without trying to answer it now: when your people heard the sermon last Sunday, whose voice did they hear?
In John 10, the sheep follow the shepherd because they know his voice. They will not follow a stranger because they do not know the voice of strangers. There is a kind of recognition that happens between a shepherd and his flock that is grounded in particularity. The pastor who outsources the prep of his preaching to a model trained on the entire internet should not be surprised when his sheep slowly stop recognizing the voice that comes from the pulpit.
More on this in the dedicated post. For now, just notice: this is happening, and very few congregations have any idea.
Counseling and Pastoral Care
Pastors are using AI across the whole spectrum of pastoral care, and the spectrum is wide. Some of these uses raise questions that Scripture and Christian practice answer fairly clearly. Others sit in genuinely harder territory. I want to walk the range honestly rather than collapse it into a verdict.
At one end, a pastor asks a model for biblical counsel on a category of struggle without identifying any particular person. He is wrestling with how to address chronic anxiety in a believer who has not responded to the usual encouragements. He asks the model what the Puritans wrote on persistent fear, what passages bear on it most directly, what frameworks have been used to distinguish ordinary anxiety from clinical depression. This is much closer to consulting a book or a trusted colleague than to outsourcing pastoral care. The pastor still has to test what he reads against Scripture. He still has to apply it to a particular soul. He has not transferred a sacred trust to anyone. There is room to argue the wisdom of any individual case, but I do not see this as a category Scripture or pastoral practice rules out.
At the other end, a pastor uploads the verbatim transcript of a counseling session into a model and asks it to summarize and store the content for future reference. This is a different category of action. The Christian church has long held that what a man tells his pastor in confidence stays with the pastor, because the trust honest pastoral care depends on cannot be sustained any other way. Proverbs is direct about the moral weight of guarded speech: “Whoever goes about slandering reveals secrets, but he who is trustworthy in spirit keeps a thing covered” (11:13). Once a counselee’s words enter a third-party system that retains data for training, audit, or feature improvement, the seal has been broken in a meaningful sense, regardless of what the vendor’s terms claim. The Christian instinct here, formed by centuries of pastoral practice and grounded in plain Scripture about guarded speech, points one direction.
The harder territory is in the middle. A pastor drafts a follow-up email to a grieving member and runs the draft through a model to “make it sound less stiff.” A pastor asks a model to suggest ways to phrase a hard truth he needs to bring to an elder. A pastor takes his rough thoughts after a difficult meeting and asks a model to turn them into coherent pastoral notes. None of these obviously violate confidentiality if done carefully. None of them obviously substitute for pastoral presence. But all of them sit on a continuum that runs from “tool that polishes” to “tool that voices,” and the difference matters.
Scripture has more to bring to pastoral care than the confidentiality question alone. Paul writes to the Galatians, “Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ” (6:2). The verb is bastazō, to lift, to carry. It is a physical word. The Proverb gives the same picture from the other side: “Know well the condition of your flocks; give attention to your herds” (27:23). Both verbs describe a pastor paying attention to actual people in actual circumstances over time. AI is good at processing information about people. It is structurally something else from bearing burdens with people.
The test that has to be applied, case by case, is whether a particular AI use is strengthening the pastor’s actual presence with his people or quietly substituting for it. There is no general rule that handles every case. There is the careful, prayerful judgment of a shepherd who knows the difference between a tool that helps him serve his flock and a tool that lets him serve fewer of them less well while feeling more efficient. That judgment cannot be outsourced either.
Church Communications
This is the most pervasive AI use in the church, and it is harder to evaluate than it first appears.
Pastors are using AI for newsletters, social media, series titles, email blasts, bulletin copy, funeral announcements, and sermon graphics. The category is enormous and the practices inside it differ dramatically. A pastor who runs a Tuesday email through a model to fix typos and tighten sentences is doing something quite different from a pastor who lets a model write the sympathy note that goes out under his name to a grieving family. Treating these as the same thing is the first mistake.
Two questions are worth weighing.
The first is about voice. When churches use the same models for their communications, the prose they produce starts to sound alike. Most of the popular models default to a register that is warm, professional, and faintly therapeutic. Whether this matters depends on what voice the pastor was bringing in the first place. Some pastors have never had a strong written voice, and their congregations have never expected one. For others, the written voice has been a real part of how the congregation knows them across the week. Where that continuity is real, replacing it with a model’s version of warmth is a loss that is worth weighing carefully. Where it is not, the loss is harder to identify.
The second is about representation. Communications shape congregational expectations of who their pastor is. When the email going out under his name has been heavily generated by a system, the gap between the man who shows up at the hospital and the man whose name is on the email begins to widen. This matters more in some contexts than others. A short logistical email about the women’s retreat is one thing. A pastoral letter to the congregation after a tragedy is another. The closer the communication is to actual pastoral work, the more weight the representation question carries.
Scripture’s general counsel on the weight of words is worth holding nearby. “Death and life are in the power of the tongue” (Proverbs 18:21). Words are not just packaging in pastoral ministry. They are part of the work itself. The most defensible practice I can name in general terms is that the pastor know, for each communication going out under his name, what the model did and what he did, and that the closer the communication is to genuine pastoral care, the more of it should be his own work. Use AI to fix typos. Be more careful as the words approach the work of caring for souls.
Discipleship Tools
Here is the use case least likely to be on a pastor’s radar, because it is mostly happening outside what he directly sees.
Members of his congregation are using AI Bible apps to ask questions about Scripture. They are using AI prayer companions to talk through anxiety at midnight. They are using AI devotional generators to start their mornings. They are subscribing to AI-driven podcasts that match content to their listening history. They are downloading apps that offer to be their “spiritual companion.” Some have asked a model for counsel on their marriages. Some have asked a model whether they should leave their church.
This is not the future. This is what congregations are doing now.
The evaluative question is harder than the empirical one. Some of these uses look like the modern equivalent of consulting a study Bible or a Christian book. A believer asking AI for cross-references on a passage is doing something believers have done with concordances for centuries, with the obvious differences that the AI is faster, less reliable in places, and not authored by an identifiable Christian mind. Other uses are stranger and have no direct precedent. A believer who has long, intimate, daily conversations with a model about his prayer life and his marriage is in a category Christian formation has not had to evaluate before, and the church does not yet have settled categories for it.
What Scripture is clear about is that formation is meant to happen in the saturation of ordinary life with the truth of God, mediated through a community God has placed around the believer. Deuteronomy 6 describes it as something that happens “when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise” (v. 7). The Reformed tradition has always understood the local church as the ordinary means by which God shapes His people, through Word, sacrament, and the fellowship of the saints. Whatever else AI tools are doing in believers’ lives, they are not the church. They are not preaching in the appointed sense, not administering the means of grace, not bearing the keys of the kingdom.
The pastor’s question here is less about the tools themselves and more about scale. A believer shaped by twenty hours a week of personalized AI companionship and ninety minutes a week of corporate worship is being formed primarily by the former, even where his formal theology is being delivered by the latter. The faithful pastoral response is not to denounce the tools. It is to know what his people are using and to bring it into the light of his shepherding.
A separate post is coming on this question. (”Your People Are Already Being Discipled by Machines.”) For now, see it. The sheep are eating somewhere, and the pasture the pastor tends is not the only field they are in.
The Uses I Have Not Named
I have given the four most important categories. There are more, and the reader should know they exist even if I do not have space to address each here.
Pastors are using AI to draft elder board meeting agendas, summarize denominational reports, manage their calendars, generate policies, and compose internal staff memos. This is the operational layer of church life, and it is being quietly automated at scale. Some of it looks straightforwardly fine. Some of it sits closer to the questions raised in earlier sections, particularly policy work that touches doctrine or pastoral practice.
Pastors are using AI for exegesis itself. Greek and Hebrew parsing assistants. Cross-reference engines. Models trained on commentary databases that produce competent-sounding interpretations in seconds.
Pastors are using AI in their own personal devotional and emotional lives. Asking it to pray for them. Talking to it in the small hours when no one else is awake. Confessing, in a kind of way, to a system that cannot absolve. This category sits closest to the questions raised by AI in pastoral care, and it deserves its own essay.
I name these to make a single point. The map is wider than the four categories I have walked through, and the machine is in more rooms of the church than any single post can show.
What Is Forming Whom
The author of Hebrews writes that pastors “are keeping watch over your souls, as those who will have to give an account” (13:17).
That account is the frame I keep returning to. The model will not give an account on the day of judgment. The shepherd will. Whatever AI does in his ministry, the burden of having shepherded these particular people in this particular moment falls on the man who was called to it. He is accountable for what was formed on his watch, including any of it that has been outsourced to systems he has not stopped to examine.
This post does not give him the verdict on any particular use case. The whole publication exists to do that work, post by post, with the seriousness Scripture warrants and the honesty the moment requires. What this post offers is a more accurate picture of the field he is shepherding. The questions the map raises are his to take up, with his elders, with his peers, and with his Bible open. The work cannot be done for him.
The shepherd does not have to be a Luddite. He does have to be awake.
The machine is in his ministry. The watching, in this moment, is on what it is doing, what he is doing with it, and what is being formed in the people he has been given to shepherd.